🙋♀️Raise your hand if you have ever called a customer support line?
🪗Keep your hand up if you had to wait more than 30 minutes. 45 minutes.
🥜Keep your hand up if the on-hold music caused temporary insanity!
Many organizations made significant investment in user experience, web self-service, knowledge management and web content management solutions. Yet, it is still difficult and time-consuming for customers to find what’s helpful and relevant. — Gartner
The Gripe
Companies always claim two things.
Our employees are the most important thing in our business, and we treat them well; and
We respect our customers, and they mean everything to us.
In my decades on planet Earth, I have found very few companies that live up to both claims.
I have been on hold for 59 minutes as an elite (whatever that means) customer with a company I have been using for about 20 years.
I was unable to perform the task using self-service.
Online chat cannot perform the task.
Calling in the system recognized me as an elite customer and put me in the queue.
It took 59 minutes to speak to a human
It took 3 minutes to resolve the problem
There is no option to have the company call me when a customer rep is available.
The Solution
There is one obvious solution. Two other solutions would be relatively easy to implement and create a much better experience for employees and customers.
Minimum - Provide call-back option
Provide an option for customer service to call back when available — waiting on a call for over an hour listening to the worst possible music is not a way to keep customers.
Best
Provide call-back option
Allow online chat reps to (a) perform more tasks, (b) directly connect you to a live service rep.
Create self-service functionality
References
Twilio - for Customer Service